News

In the August 2009 issue of Scientific American I found this great quote from Tom Coburn on President Obama’s heightened gas mileage standard:

What if you want to drive a gas hog? You don’t have the right any longer in this country to spend your money to drive a gas hog?

See, Tom, you’re what I would call a “hypocritical shit-bag”. Yes, with the President’s new standard would mean that by 2016 all US vehicles should average some 35 miles per gallon. (The article mentions that this is something that two-decade-old Japanese cars, like the Honda Civic, have already gotten right.)

This would mean (nominally) that it’d be illegal for you to get a gas-guzzler. But with the bills and laws that you – Tom Coburn – sponsored, in this country it would be illegal to: burn a flag, marry a person of the same sex as you, use medical marijuana. So, Tom, let me see if I get this shit. You’re opposed to something that people do which has no negative impact on anyone else (flag burning and medicinal marijuana), or in fact has a positive impact (gay marriage), but get steamed up about not being allowed to pollute as much as you want?!

Holy Zombie Jesus, this guy a hypocritical shit-bag.

PS: Just remembered a very fun tid-bit. A few years ago I heard of a Ford hybrid car (gas-electric) that got the same mileage as comparable Ford non-hybrid cars. Ford designed a hybrid that did as “well” as a non-hybrid! WTF is the damn point?!

A recent college graduate is suing her alma mater for $72,000 — the full cost of her tuition and then some — because she cannot find a job.

Trina Thompson, 27, of the Bronx, graduated from New York’s Monroe College in April with a bachelor of business administration degree in information technology.

…

In her complaint, Thompson says she seeks $70,000 in reimbursement for her tuition and $2,000 to compensate for the stress of her three-month job search.

As Thompson sees it, any reasonable employer would pounce on an applicant with her academic credentials, which include a 2.7 grade-point average and a solid attendance record. But Monroe’s career-services department has put forth insufficient effort to help her secure employment, she claims.

Dear baby Joe Pesci, WTF is wrong with people?! Three months spent looking for a job and all of a sudden you’re suing the college?

Hmm, I wonder if I can sue my college too. Not for not finding a job, but for not being entirely happy with the job I found. That’s along the same lines of thinking, right?

My family has accepted the fact that I don’t know anything about current affairs. I don’t have a TV (get ’24’ and ‘House’ in the form of torrents and watch them on my Xbox), don’t read the papers, don’t bother reading CNN or any other news sources. I didn’t know when that guy threw a shoe at Governor Bush. Didn’t know about that pilot who landed a plane in a river and then all the asshole passengers thanked God for it. Didn’t know about swine flu until I got a semi-panicked phone call this evening.

I assumed XKCD just had yet another brilliant idea, namely of starting a rumor about a fictional disease and watching the masses go ape-shit. Now the comic seems less funny.

Social networking site Facebook has seen its first drop in UK users in January, new industry data indicates.

Users fell 5% to 8.5 million in January from 8.9 million in December, according to data from Nielsen Online.

This was the first drop in user numbers since July 2006 when Nielsen began compiling data on the site.

Nic Howell, deputy editor of industry magazine New Media Age, said the site was no longer as popular among its core audience of young people.

I’m cynical and not at all positive about humanity’s future (surprise!), but this is one of those rare news items that makes me take pause and reflect. Oh, I still think we’re going to bomb ourselves into the stone age fairly soon, now I’m thinking that it possibly could maybe be a bad thing. Perhaps.

Reading an article on Will Smith, after hearing on “The Colbert Report” that Will Smith is a Scientologist, I found out about a bit of a misunderstanding that came about after his comments on Hitler. Specifically, this is what was said:

Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today’… I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.

For that little comment, the Jewish Defense League jumped on Smith, labeling it “ignorant, detestable and offensive”. They also tried to boycott “I Am Legend” and attempted to force Hollywood to black-list Smith. A bit of an overreaction, wouldn’t you say?

Do I agree with Will Smith about Hitler? Absolutely. Very few people think themselves as evil. Most of us consider our actions to be “good” and “right”, even when doing something that the rest of society might condemn. Hitler tried to exterminate Jews because he thought it was the right thing to do. 19 Middle Eastern men decided to pilot planes into buildings because they thought it was the right thing to do. Priests accused of sexually abusing children were relocated by bishops of the Roman Catholic church because the bishops thought it was the right thing to do. These people didn’t do something with the knowledge that what they were doing was wrong. Hell, even if they thought it was wrong, there still must have been a compelling enough reason for them to go through with the act, meaning that they still thought that the act was something that ought be done.

The JDL dropped it boycotting calls and the Anti-Defamation League accepted Smith’s apology after he took steps to “unequivocally condemn Hitler as an evil person”. Oh boy.

Is it better to pretend that the world is split up into “good” and “evil” people, or to acknowledge that people are (mostly) products of their environment? If you take the former stand, there’s really no hope for a rather large segment of society: death is the only solution. Personally, I think that people are the sum of their experiences: “good” and “evil” are labels that describe more a person’s past than the person. Who knows, maybe Hitler was picked on in school by a Jewish bully?

Is it wrong to give people the benefit of the doubt? Is it “ignorant” to think that no one is a lost cause? Seems to me, the only ignorant action is to accept something as fact without even once thinking the matter over. To “unequivocally condemn Hitler as an evil person”.